THOMAS PYNCHON, A LIVING LITERARY LEGEND, RETURNS WITH A MASTERPIECE
In my youth, like every other aspiring intellectual, I knew I had to read Thomas Pynchon. He was one of the great living American novelists, along with McCarthy, DeLillo and Roth. But while I enjoyed Gravity’s Rainbow, a postwar epic about paranoia and power, and The Crying of Lot 49, his sophomore novel that established a career-long concern with conspiracy, I often felt muddled by them, their relentless propulsion. Being 20 years old, I would have been reluctant to admit the truth: I often had to re-read passages to make sure I’d got them straight, and even then I sometimes didn’t.
Pynchon hasn’t changed. If you asked me to relay in precise detail what takes place on every page of his ninth novel, Shadow Ticket, I wouldn’t get full marks. But at least today, I can admit that – and the fact that the complexity is why I love it so much. Between the novel’s sheer weirdness, its obscurity, its evocative 1930s setting and its joyously Raymond Chandler-esque dialogue – pinging back and forth between hard-boiled men and sharp-tongued broads – I enjoyed Shadow Ticket more than any other Pynchon.
Recommended
Where to start with Thomas Pynchon
Pynchon is now 88, and famously shy of publicity, albeit not self-serious – he has voiced himself in The Simpsons, drawn with a bag over his head. His novels are uncompromisingly complex, yes, but that aspect is also overstated: they’re alluringly filled, too, with Americana and music and intriguing women. Conspiracy abounds, rebels congregate, and those disaffected with the mundanity of everyday life come to see that reality is far more pliable than assumed. Though his work reveals the delusion which underpins American life, he also reveals what is good, fun, and interesting enough about it to warrant all the self-deceit.
He has had one of the last A-list literary careers, publishing his first three novels to the kind of rapt audience we all worry doesn’t exist for serious fiction today. Each of his books is a major event. Paul Thomas Anderson adapted his novel Inherent Vice into an acclaimed 2014 movie, and Vineland into One Battle After Another, which has recently arrived in cinemas. His fans, and there are millions, are dedicated and serious; they exchange gossip and theories, and long to be immersed in his screwy worlds.
Shadow Ticket may well be Pynchon’s final novel, and I’ve heard disappointment that it isn’t set in the present day, given how easily Trump’s America lends itself to zany satire. But not to worry: that, in its way, is what this book becomes.
We begin in Milwaukee in 1932, following Hicks McTaggart – nearly every name here is gleefully excessive – a neighbourhood heavy whose light touch, we’re told, fools women into thinking he’s a sensitive type. (That, and he can dance.) Hicks works as a private eye, and he’s thrown into an especially bewildering case: solving the disappearance of a cheese heiress – daughter of “the Al Capone of Cheese” – who has absconded with a clarinet player. Heading off in pursuit leads Hicks into immediate peril: after being mysteriously bonked on the head, he wakes up aboard a transatlantic liner heading east. Awaiting him in Europe is a large nest of spies, Nazis, Soviets, biker gangs, molls, anti-Semitic vigilantes, and a good deal of the supernatural.
Early on, a gunslinger says he’s willing to teach Hicks some moves – “Just so long as you ain’t another one of these metaphysical detectives.” Which, of course, Hicks is. It isn’t long before Pynchon begins to blur the edges of reality for his hero, and for us. Before being a PI, we learn, Hicks was a strikebreaker; he gave it up not for political or moral reasons, but because, during one dust-up, a weapon disappeared from his hand just as he was about to kill a striking worker. He consults a local psychic, who tells him it probably “asported”, as some objects in Pynchon world are inclined to do.
Pynchon’s gift has always been his ability to render America in its full strangeness: a divided people looking askew in all directions, united only by their common fantasy of there being a Real America to return to. Again and again, he reiterates the thwarted dream that there ever was such a thing. Maybe that’s why he hasn’t set this novel in the present day: the actual contemporary US is too Pynchonian to appear in fiction. Remember, an image-obsessed despot is ruling the world’s most powerful nation by decree, and crushing anyone who makes him look stupid.
Better to consider 21st-century difficulties in Shadow Ticket’s 1930s world. At one point, two characters share an amiable coffee as European fascism flares around them. Pynchon imagines the conversation they ought to be having: “Stay or go. Two fates begin to diverge – back to the US, marry, raise a family, assemble a life you can persuade yourself is free from fear, as meanwhile, over here, the other outcome continues to unfold, to roll in dark as the end of time… Until one night, too late, you wake into an understanding of what you should have been doing with your life all along.” It’s the sort of harrowing confrontation many of us are having – or struggling to avoid having – with ourselves in the current reality.
And yet, for all the darkness of Pynchon’s taxonomy, the book is full of exuberance. There’s the charged lust of the jazz clubs in which Hicks and his girlfriend April dance. There’s a painfully funny scene in which a Shirley Temple-type movie star appears in a film where she gorges on rich foods: the Depression-starved audiences riot and attack the screen. Pynchon’s sentences themselves are so alive, so pleasurable. And in my recollection of struggling through some of his work, I’d forgotten just how funny he is. Take the jilted fiancé of the cheese heiress, spluttering his contempt for her family: “They sell each other used cars they know will catch fire at awkward moments.”
The fact that Shadow Ticket is brilliant and prescient isn’t a surprise; that it exudes so much joy and sensuousness is. To have had the career Pynchon has had, and still be so invigorated by your work, is all any novelist can ask. I hope this isn’t his last hurrah – but if it is, what a way to go out.
Megan Nolan’s latest novel is Ordinary Human Failings. Shadow Ticket is published by Jonathan Cape at £22. To order your copy for £19.99, call 0330 173 0523 or visit Telegraph Books
2025-09-29T09:31:23Z